


By Lineage and By Deed

by lynndyre



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Bookverse BotFA, Bookverse Elves, Gen, M/M, Movieverse Bard Family, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-17 00:15:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4645287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bard, after the battle, and after that.</p><p>
  <i>"The Elvenking is my friend."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Lineage and By Deed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [monkiainen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/monkiainen/gifts).



The wake of battle was a strange mixture of jubilation and anguish, hope and exhaustion. Bard felt it as if from a distance. 

The bodies of goblins and wargs and bats were dragged together, piled and burned with the charcoal remnants of Smaug's desolation as their fuel. But there were rows and piles of men, too, and the men were familiar; men he knew by sight, to speak to, men he'd drunk with. Boys who weren't yet men, and now never would be. Their faces- their fate- tensed his jaw, and tugged with dull, animal pain at his gut. The ache of battle in his shoulders bled into the ache of hauling the dead.

Their allies had fared no better. Bard had seen Men dead before, many times, dead of illness or drowning; of accident, fire, or murder. He had seen death in dwarves, years ago and only a single time. But they, like men, were made to die. Bard knelt to set down the body of an elf-girl barely older-seeming than his own Sigrid, and closed her clouding eyes. He brushed his hand over her braids, impossibly soft beneath his calloused palm.

The touch at his shoulder was gentle, and he looked up. The Elvenking regarded the girl, and for a breath his eyes were distant with sorrow. His face was clean, but his armour, like Bard's clothing, was still stained in black and rust. His voice was rough.

"Come away from the dead. Be among the living, for a little, it will aid your spirit." Bard stumbled in rising, and Thranduil's grip at his elbow anchored him fast.

"I'm sorry. For your people."

"And I for yours."

Gandalf summoned them then apart, and Bard made his way back to the tents. Bain was bruised, and cut across one arm, but he was warm and living in Bard's arms, smelling like war but beneath it like Bard's child, like he always had. Bard held him close.

Thorin, King of Pride and Ruin and forever now Under the Mountain was buried with all the ceremony they could manage. It was an easy thing to return to him the Arkenstone, for the stone felt heavy and unkind in Bard's grip, and meant more to the dwarves than he could truly understand. Of the gold Dain offered in return, Bard sent it ahead to the Master in Laketown. 

The Emeralds of Girion were a story his mother had told him, mixed with memories, handed down, and the reality of them spilled wistful and unfamiliar over his fingers. He could not imagine wearing them. Nor, though he tried, could he see them adorning his children. The Black Arrow had been a truer legacy, heirloom of what Girion's house had endured and become. The emeralds, beautiful as they were, did not feel so.

He gifted them to the Elvenking instead, and saw that he had chosen aright. They hung green and bright against the forest-shaded cloth of his coat, and glittered through the fall of his bright hair when it slipped forward over his shoulders. Thranduil's smile was wider, offered in thanks, than the smile he offered in diplomacy, and there was a different cant to his face in privacy between them. The space of his forearm where Thranduil had gripped it carried that impression of touch long after the elven host had departed.

 

Returning to the shores of the lake where the people of Laketown had made camp, Bard found new concerns. The Master was gone, and much of the gold, and Sigrid's eyes were rimmed in red from trying to shoulder too many burdens larger than herself, as she and other women tried to keep the builders fed, the sick tended, and their resolve alive. Bard folded her into his arms and spoke his pride into her hair.

Laketown's herbalist said that despair opened the way to sickness, and Bard was surprised to see the elven healer nod. Tilda's closest playmate, Urda, had been carried safe from the town only to die, uninjured, on the shore. It was too common a tale.

Rebuilding would give people hope. The battle was won. The threat was gone. Things would improve. Dale could be restored. Without threat of the dragon, the land would thrive. With the work of the dwarves, trade would increase.

But the winter was hard. 

In spring, the Elvenking returned to the lake. The elves had sent what aid they might through the winter, stores of food, and cloth, but with the shift in season they brought with them new flowers, drink, and meat sent fresh down the river.

The winter houses were small, unpleasant after so long, close compared to the open air. And so they feasted elven-style, under the sky. Elven lights were hung, and bonfires lit, and people were singing. There were nuts heated in the fire, and the first fresh greens. One of the elven hunters had gifted Tilda a bag of honey candies.

Bard remembered the crowded smugness of the Master's halls, the self-aggrandizement that accompanied every dish. He found the present more to his liking. But Bard's attention was drawn away from the feast, reminded, by the cooking, of the fish Laric had brought in only that day, strange-smelling and unfit to eat. He had fished them near the ruin of Laketown, and Bard feared fresh poisons were now leeching from the dragon's corpse. 

If the southern waters of the lake were tainted – nothing could exist here, without Long Lake. Dale could, perhaps, draw water from the stream that flowed from Erebor, but that water also was dragon-fouled, and flushed with metals and the effluent of the mountain.

He met the Elvenking's glance across the fire. And when he turned away from the crowd, Thranduil was there to draw him aside.

"You are troubled?"

"I am not... made, I think, for this kind of merry-making. I have little sense of the role they wish me to play."

"Perhaps only the role of yourself? You have led them well. And spring is a time for joy." There was a laugh somewhere behind Thranduil's eyes, and a smile at the edge of his lips, and the wine he poured for Bard's cup is rich and heady as summer.

Bard did not smile, but felt his body ease in Thranduil's presence. "You may be right."

"Tell me your worry, then. Set it down for the night."

But when Bard spoke, the laughter behind the Elvenking's eyes stilled, and he signaled one of his captains to remain. "Show me."

The spring night was cold but the air was clear, and the after-sense of sunlight had lingered. The moon was high enough and full enough for Bard to see clearly, as his eyes adjusted to the night away from the mismatched lights of the lakeside camp. Bard suspected he could have followed the Elvenking even in full darkness, his skin and hair seemed to shine with a faint glow at the corners of Bard's vision, though it vanished when he looked straight on. 

They made their way south, following the current, until the ruins of Laketown were clear before them. Beyond, Bard knew the dragon's corpse lay still glittering and rotting beneath the water. At the shoreline Thranduil dipped his hand beneath the water and brought it to his face, but did not drink. He turned his palm, and let it fall.

"Your fisherman was right. There is corruption here, spreading as the water warms. This will prove ill for both our peoples." He held his hand full beneath the surface, fingers spread, and spoke soft words, and in the low light the water seemed to move. For a long time, he said nothing. Then he rose, and turned again to face Bard.

"I have some command over the stream that runs beneath the trees. Those waters flow hence, diluted by the marshes and the rapids and the greater current, diluted further still by the lake itself. But they remember my voice. It may be we can speak to the water."

"I have no power such as yours. The thrush I understood by virtue of lineage. But I have no gift of tongues, and no ancestors who knew how to do this."

"These are not, I think, words you should speak, even could I teach them to you. They would burn your throat, or avail you nothing. Your spirit is housed in your body differently than that of mine and my kin, and does not easily reach outside it. But yours is the lordship here, and we are allies enough I think, for this." 

This was a different trust than relying on other men in a fight, but Bard found the trust was there. He pulled off his shirt and jacket, and dropped them beside the spill of elven fabric to follow Thranduil into the water. 

The winter chill that clung still to the depths of the lake crept up their legs, soaking the cloth at Bard's thighs, biting at the flesh of his stomach. Thranduil seemed not to feel the lake lapping coldly at his body. He spoke to the water, cupped it in his hands and let it flow out between his fingers. And the words he spoke moved through the lakewater, carrying meaning, until as each wave washed against Bard’s body he could feel its intent, and see images behind his eyes. Tendrils of thought reached outward in spinning currents.

Bard felt that something in that power sought to know him, to know his will, and he was compelled to answer – Let Smaug's evil poison nothing else.

"Do you speak for those who claim this land, this water?" The common speech curled foreign on Thranduil's tongue, carried an accent Bard had never heard.

But if Bard did not feel himself a king, he had experience at least in being a guardsman. A father. Laketown's people were his to protect. That had never changed. The dragon's death was here by his hand. "I do. By lineage and by deed, I have that right." 

Bard's hands sung like struck metal where they gripped elven fingers, and he felt himself swept clean under Thranduil's words. His mouth tasted fish drawn from these waters, his shoulders felt the pull of the current against his barge-pole. Long Lake knew Bard's will, and remembered him.

Thranduil sang of rotting, of decay and the small unlovely things that feed on it. And he sang of purification, of bones eaten clean, white beneath the water. Of the lakebed strewn with scales and gems, of the fish that danced in the hollows of the dragon’s skull. Of Smaug's corruption held within his bones, the empty shell of his body, held there and contained, while the surrounding water swept clear and unpoisoned to either side.

The rush of it faded slowly, altered but unceasing, in the way the sound of singing insects merges with the constant buzz of the night, and Bard was left blinking against the moonlight. He wanted to laugh- standing in the lake up to his belly, stripped to the waist and talking to the water with an elf. But the water was cleaner, and people would be safe. His cheek curled upwards despite himself. The laugh-light in Thranduil's eyes and the twist of his mouth answered him.

They regarded each other. 

Strange in its very ordinariness, the shoulders of the Elvenking were marked even as the cheeks of Bard's children in summertime. Sun-brightened freckles were little patches of darkness under the moonlight, and made his skin seem as dappled by the starlight as the water of the lake. His body was scarred with silver in the low light, shadowed where the flesh was raised. Marks of battle. His hands were warm in Bard's, despite the cold, strong and smooth-calloused.

When Thranduil leant forward, his hair trailed in the water, floating and twisting across the surface. It brushed Bard's skin, even as Thranduil's lake-wet hands rose to his face, and Bard reached out to pull him in.

Spring was a time for joy.


End file.
